If you’re comfortable with quietly desperate social realism – think Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake , Mike Leigh’s Another Year or the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night – you should get along quite nicely with Rosie , the newest from Paddy Breathnach.
The Irish director, working from a screenplay by writer Roddy Doyle ( The Commitments ), tells the simple story of Rosie Davis (Sarah Greene), her husband, Jean Paul (Moe Dunford), and their four children. “Only four,” Jean Paul jokes to a realtor as he’s checking out a house for sale. She replies that maybe this particular house isn’t right for him and his larger-than-average family.
Rosie and Jean Paul are homeless, though they prefer to say “between homes.” As the film begins they’ve been without a place to live for two weeks. (Non-profit Focus Ireland last year found that three-quarters of homeless families had been in long-term tenancies before landlords withdrew their properties from the market, the same situation as in Rosie.)
The family dog has been shipped off to Jean Paul’s brother, who complains that even that’s too much for his tiny flat and pregnant wife to handle. When the brother uses the H word, Rosie corrects him: “We’re not homeless we’re just – lost. Locked out, that’s it. We’ve lost our keys.” The children, aged 4 to 13, each gets a version of this line, although the eldest is well aware of what’s going on.
Without getting bogged down in didacticism, Doyle’s script makes it clear that this could happen to anyone living paycheque to paycheque (Jean Paul works in a restaurant) in Dublin or any other first-world city. The couple has a decent car, middle-class trappings and cellphones – they just don’t have any place to put them, or to lay their heads.
The film, set over a tense 36 hours, mostly stays with Rosie as she drops the kids at school, frantically tries to find a place for the night, then picks them up again. Her many phone calls are subtle variations on: “I’m looking for a room. Just for the night. Dublin City Council Credit Card. Thanks anyway.” Even with the municipality picking up the tab, there’s no room at the inn.
Dolye’s sympathetic screenplay is a masterwork of restraint. In a film like this, the temptation is to pile crisis on top of crisis until the tension reaches a breaking point – Ken Loach’s excellent but exhausting Sorry We Missed You , which played festivals in Cannes, Toronto and Montreal last year, is a perfect example. In Rosie , I was certain that Peachy the stuffed rabbit would get misplaced, igniting a rebellion among the kids that would then spiral into something worse.
But Peachy survives unscathed, and even the brief disappearance of eldest Kayleigh never tips the film into thriller territory. And while Rosie has a habit of swearing at her husband or one of the kids, she also manages to apologize in literally the same breath.
It just goes to show that you don’t always need life-or-death stakes to create nail-biting tension in a film. Sometimes all it takes is the threat of spending a night in a car rather than a house, and the realization that it could happen to you.
Rosie opens Jan. 31 in Toronto, Edmonton and Regina; Feb. 7 in Calgary; Feb. 14 in Saskatoon; and March 13 in Ottawa.
3.5 stars out of 5
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
